This Little Piggy... (Chapter One, part 3)

I did not make it to the funeral. Breakdowns will do that to you. I was sitting at the dining room table, just sitting by myself, replaying the phone call and fingering the thickening scab on my lip, sitting with a glass and a bottle of Jack, one filled more than the other, when the doorbell rang and a neighbor presented me with lasagna. She was younger than I by two decades, maybe two decades and a smidge, in a dress she put on to pay her respects and tears streaking her cheeks.“I don’t know what to say”, she croaked, the baking pan extended towards me. It was there my mind turned left. “Was the sex that bad?” I asked taking the pasta and sort of shoving it across the table. A pile of condolence cards exploded before the traveling platter. To mydecaying consciousness each remembrance took flight like so many handfuls of confetti floating before a macabre parade. Some fell on the floor; the lasagna stopped short of that fate settling an inch or two from the edge. I remember wishing it would fall, wanting to know the sound it would make. My neighbor, Janet, I think it was Janet, did not notice. She was already responding to my response to her, “I don’t know what to say” cliché.

“You shouldn’t make me laugh.”“I don’t want to you laugh. I want to satisfy you. Family honor. You understand.”

And just like that, without another thought, I started peeling off three day old clothes. I struggled out of a t-shirt stained with liquor and god knows what else, exposing sixty year old flab and sag. I went straight to work on the pants without noticing that condolence had left the building. Janet’s expressions changed rapidly from confusion to revulsion to terror. I do not recall sympathy; I don’t recall much of anything. I just kept talking.“I’m sure I can do it again. Twice if we need to, but I will probably have to sit.”I watched unchanged boxers flutter down my legs towards the floor and spent some time studying a rather sad and decidedly unthreatening dick. I remember admiring my gray corona and thinking I wasn’t as bald as people thought. When I looked up Janet was gone. One hour later, so was I.

Additional Excerpts fromTHIS LITTLE PIGGY...

"He had virtually no ambitions (except his long held dream to become an adult film director), favoring odd jobs to the office gigs secured by his father."

"...we can believe what we want but we will never know for sure. Our daughter-in-law, God help her and keep her (because I don't want her), slept with an ugly troll of a man..."

"He crafted a picture of my daughter-in-law that contradicted every one of my observations. If I believed my son, and I did, his wife at home was not the wife who helped Brenda prepare holiday meals in the kitchen or who laughed at my jokes across the dinner table at our favorite restaurant."

" George said sex not love and that's what I said."

"I realized I did not care how Brenda saw me. George had accomplished something extraordinary. It was real. It had substance. It could be studied and appreciated. "

Excerpt from "Divine Intervention"

I cannot get away from the thump…thump…thumping of her basketball on the asphalt. I hear it in the house and it follows me on those days when need and energy propel me outdoors to the market, to the dry cleaners or to that bench by the pond where I used to enjoy an afternoon read. ..